Welcome to My Kiwi story! The ongoing series about our dedicated employees and their lives at Kiwi.com.
This time we’re discussing what it takes to be an Event Manager with our Event Team Lead, Veronika Fialová, what struggles that may occur while preparing for industry trade fairs and how she sees the realization of trade fairs in the coming years.
Hi Veronika! Would you like to tell us something about yourself?
I hail from a small town in Northern Bohemia, but I’ve been living in Brno since 2011. After my studies, I started working as an assistant in a company that produces drilling and boring mills. I really couldn’t see myself working long term in this environment, therefore, I applied to Kiwi.com and voila! My better days began! I joined Kiwi.com and the Business Development team in 2016 when the team had just 8 people and our office was at one villa in Brno.
I remember how shocking for me it was to see a different work-style from the one I had before Kiwi.com. Fruit, coffee, and tea for free?! A friendly and informal atmosphere?! No way! It took me some time to realize that it was really happening.
You have had the opportunity to work on Kiwi.com exposure in the biggest travel fairs around the world. What does your work look like in practice?
As an assistant to the Business Development team, I helped them with a lot of things related to conferences. Over the years, we started participating in many conferences worldwide where we had a Kiwi.com stand and my work started to be more conference and event-related.
Our biggest event every year is the ITB conference in Berlin. We have a very big booth there and my job is to prepare everything from A to Z. It can be very physically demanding while being on the spot and coordinating everything plus being reachable via email. For example, once in Brussels organizers forgot to put our graphic design on our booth, so our guys had just white walls. The organizers promised to fix it overnight, but they put our graphic design on the wrong booth, so we stayed logo-less again! I’m organizing everything from Czechia and also relying on other third parties, so mistakes can happen. Problem-solving and stress-management are key skills in these situations!
How do you see trade fairs and similar live exposure events in the coming years?
That’s a difficult one. Can anyone really predict what will be the trend in conferences and live events over the next few years? After we cancelled our live events, we began preparing and attending online meet ups. However, in my opinion, nothing beats face-to-face human interaction at these kinds of fairs and gatherings. I don’t think the trend of being fully remote will ever occur. People like being around others, it is human nature to congregate and ultimately that won’t change. I think that in the next year or two there will still be a lot of online events, but I have no doubt there will be a resumption of live events too.